Flash Website - Questions

Wasn't sure where else to post this, so feel free to move it if it's in the wrong place.

I'm looking to put up a simple flash site (think Adina-style - I really love the way her site looks) pretty soon and I'm wondering if anyone could offer any insight or advice with regard to the process, the costs and work involved, etc. I'm completely new to all of it.

What is the minimum number of images that you need for a decent representation of your work? (My thought was that I would try to get about 20 strong, diverse images together and that could conceivably adequately represent what I am capable of.)

Aside from the actual construction fee, what are the other costs involved? I've heard that you have to pay upwards of 200 bucks a year just for a server. Is that true?

Anything else that I should know about?

Thanks.

There are several sites out there that will do almost everything for you, for a price of course. They offer templates where you can basically drag and drop your images. Blu Domain is the fist thing that comes to mind. Adina is the one who introduced them to me a few years ago, but I have never used them. I do have some friends that use them and they are very happy with the service. Here is there site.I think they paid about $800/year for it though. Google flash web templates and I'm sure you will find lots of places offering the same service.

I always meant to use some of the web building templates and features that GoDaddy offers, but never got around to doing it. My wife used them for a simple site that she built, and it looks pretty nice. It's not a photo gallery, but I'm sure they have some things for photographers.

If you have Photoshop, or Lightroom you may have what you need to create your own website. These programs have some built in features that will create a web gallery for you. I did one last night for a client that you can see here. This was all done using Adobe Bridge. It's not a full website like you are looking for, but it's a start. I plan on completely redoing my site based on the galleries that I can build using Photoshop.

Mike, thanks a bunch for the info. I just went over to Blu and the stuff looks impressive enough for me. I'm a little confused as to the packages and why they have names. lol (I was looking at "emmanuel" and "jose" as possibilities).

And I my misreading something or can you basically get a website running with them for $500?

I love the your Bridge gallery, btw, so that may be another option.

My main goal here is to get something decent-looking up as soon as possible (which also means I'm going to be shooting my ass off in the next month or so to get those 20 non-embarrassing images ready).

Anyway, thanks again.

Lightroom generates very nice flash galleries with various templates (<a href="http://portfolio.crlitberg.com/pbwildlife/index.html">Here's</a> one of mine that uses a different template than the one Mike show did). There are other programs that will do it as well.

I build my own site with Dreamweaver and free CSS templates. I think I'm paying about $80 a year for my website hosting and domain. Although I keep meaning to tweak to a better guestbook. Most of these hosting sites have extra scripts or applications you can access for free and add to your site.

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Originally Posted by CaraRose

I think I'm paying about $80 a year for my website hosting and domain. Although Most of these hosting sites have extra scripts or applications you can access for free and add to your site.

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I concur! Take a look at the link in my signature line. I pay $95/yr for 600 gigs of space with vodahost.com and I'm running Gallery2 software which is one of three full gallery solutions that comes free with the hosting service. They have several thousand template variations available - both flash and non flash (incidentally, if you're trying to get your name out on the web, flash is about the worst possible choice, because search engines can't see it to index it properly) and all of these options have e-commerce plug-ins so you can sell photos through PayPal if you decide to.

Dear Dray
Most flash sites that I have seen can be very slow in loading, and this, if nothing else is enough to send visitors to the mountains. Keep it as simple as possible.
My twopence worth.

Tom

Flash is cool if used sparingly. But I dislike pure Flash Web sites. As soon as I see one of those Flash loading icons, I get itchy clicking fingers. More important, unless something has changed, Flash is next to worthless for Google indexing. A pure Flash site has no metatags so it can't tell search engines what's on the site. That's just bad Web design. And this might not seem like a big deal, but a lot of people have iPhones these days and the iPhone doesn't see Flash at all. So a Flash site won't work at all on the iPhone.

I'll recommend Portfoliositez.com. I've been using them for a few months and have been extremely pleased. I've said it before, but their customer service was about the best I've had in years (for anything). I had a bunch of questions when starting up the site that I emailed and they replied to every single one within about an hour or 2. Costs about 16 bucks a month and you get password protected galleries, a shopping cart (ability to order online), galleries, video, etc. All customizable and updatable with ease. The cost to buy the template was 20 dollars (if my memory serves me correctly).

www.elmsphotography.ca

I used the Diego template.